Thursday, April 30, 2015

Because of health issues, I am suspending my preparation of Windows as of May 1. Over the last 11 years, first by email, then on the original Windows site and more recently on the new series site, I have prepared more than 8,000 WOEs. I have thoroughly enjoyed the production as well as the interaction it has afforded me with so many of you.At some point in the future, I hope to be able to resume.Best wishes to you all! Paul Goble

Staunton, April 30 – Both Vladimir
Putin and Ramzan Kadyrov have a deep interest in avoiding a complete break, the
former because a new Chechen war would be “a moral catastrophe” that would
undermine his myth and the latter because he would not survive without the
enormous sums of money Moscow currently sends him, Leonid Radzikhovsky says.

But
there are at least two reasons why they may not be able to avoid a break that
would ultimately threaten both. On the one hand, an important part of Putin’s
constituency in Moscow consists of siloviki who are furious at Kadyrov and want
revenge. And on the other, and perhaps even more significantly, Moscow is
running out of money to fund Kadyrov as it has up to now.

As
Olga Solovyeva points out in today’s “Nezavisimaya gazeta,” Russia’s regions
are at the edge of “financial instability” and are being forced to cut staff
and programs to try to make ends meet (http://www.ng.ru/economics/2015-04-30/4_ffinance.html).
If Putin continues to fund Chechnya while cutting support to the others, he
will be creating an even large problem.

The arguments of both Radzikhovsky
and Solovyeva are thus worth close attention.

According to Radzikhovsky, “if
Ramzan Kadyrov begins to seriously get involved in a conflict with Moscow, this
would mean the end of Putin and the collapse of the Putin myth” that the
Kremlin leader pacified the North Caucasus. In the case of a new Chechen war,
Russians would rally around him, “but all the same this would be a catastrophe”
Putin wants to avoid.

But Kadyrov has equally compelling
reasons to want to avoid this: He will hold out in Chechnya just as long as the
money comes from Moscow. “If this conveyer stops, Chechnya will explode and
Kadyrov will simply be killed for in this region there are enough militants who
hate Kadyrov.”

Radzikhovsky argues that “there
cannot be any unity of Chechnya against Moscow.” What is on view now is “the
unity of Chechnya purchased by Russian money. But the unity of Chechnya against
the Russian Federation is unreal.” And the same thing is true of Daghestan which
would disintegrate if Makhachkala tried to fight the center.

Obviously after the dust up over
the Boris Nemtsov murder, Kadyrov “will try to show to the maximum his
independence and irreplaceability.” But there are real limits, and both he and
Putin know what they are, and as a result, Putin will try to keep the money
flowing to Kadyrov in order to save himself.

But as Solovyeva points out, Russia’s
economic situation is likely to make assistance from Moscow to all regions, not
just Chechnya, ever more difficult. Many are at the edge of default even though
Moscow is taking money from the reserve fund to try to prop them up. They are
going into debt to pay their bills, and debt service is eating up their
budgets.

She cites the conclusion of Igor
Nikolayev, the director of the FBK Institute for Strategic Analysis, that next
year, Moscow may not be able to pay out to the regions the sums it has this
year from the reserve fund because that fund will be depleted. Consequently, he
says, “the main risks for the regions are after 2016.”

Staunton, April 30 – The conflicts
within the Russian Federation and across the entire post-Soviet space are occurring
because of the decisions Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin made from the 1920s
through the 1940s, Badma Byurchiyev argues, and that heritage, “a real threat
to the future” of all the countries in the region, must be rejected to escape
more disasters.

What is disturbing is that does not
seem to be appreciated even in places like the North Caucasus where Stalin’s
actions, including the politicization of ethnicity, the drawing of borders, and
the deportation of whole peoples, still remain visible to the unaided eye, the
North Caucasus commentator says (kavpolit.com/articles/objatija_stalinizma-16273/).

Indeed,
he points out, “judging by everything in Daghestan as in certain other regions
of the North Caucasus, people still greatly respect Stalin.” Three republics in
the North Caucasus Federal District lead the country in terms of the number of
streets still named for him, 16 in North Osetia, six in Daghestan, and two in
Kabardino-Balkaria.

The
commentator points out that there are two widely believed myths about Stalin,
neither of which withstands examination. On the one hand, he was hardly “’the
effective manager’” many claim. And on the other, he was not the brilliant
military leader without whom the Soviet Union would have lost the war.

Stalin’s
industrialization and collectivization campaigns degraded the population and
led to the death of as many as 13 million people. Moreover, to achieve his
ends, the Soviet dictator reached back to the period of serfdom to re-introduce
the “propiska” system that tied people to particular places without official
permission.

Scholars
like Oleg Khlevnyuk of the Russian State Archive have cast doubt on Stalin’s
supposedly great economic achievements.“For
the entire time of Stalin’s rule,” Khlevnyuk writes, “from the end of the 1920s
to 1953, there was not a single year in which there was not hunger in the
country.”

“There
were periods of mass hunger – as in 1932-1933, 1936, and 1946-1947 – but besides
these, every year in some region or another people starved,” he writes.
Millions died from that and from repression. And only a handful received the
much-ballyhooed benefits of the new regime such as pensions (http://www.rosbalt.ru/main/2015/04/15/1389043.html).

As far as Stalin’s military prowess
is concerned, there too the evidence does not support the claims of the neo-Stalinists,
Byurchiyev says. During the first year of the war, the USSR re “was incapable of
resisting Hitlerite Germany,” which had been Stalin’s ally. More than two
million Soviet military personnel were taken prisoner.

And even when the balance changed,
Russia suffered “no less than three” soldiers killed for every German soldier
who lost his life. The real size of Soviet losses may have been even worse
because “the fate of two million Soviet soldiers remains unknown,” even though
in other countries the number of unknowns has been reduced to a handful.

All of these things have imposed
terrible wounds on the societies of the post-Soviet states, the North Caucasus
analyst says. But some of Stalin’s most long-lasting negative consequences came
from actions he took between 1917 and 1923 when he was Lenin's peoples commissar for
nationalities.

Among
the problems that echo to this day which he created then are the war over
Nagorno-Karabakh, the tensions between Abkhazia and South Osetia and Georgia,
the inclusion of the Donbas in Ukraine, and the divisions and combinations of
multitude of peoples in the North Caucasus.

Given that “practically all of the
projects of the peoples commissar for nationality affairs generated conflicts,
and many of those conflicts continue to involve bloodshed to this day,” Byurchiyev
says, one is compelled to ask on what basis did Stalin act? Was he simply foolish
or did he act on “the good old principle of ‘divide and rule’?”

However one answers that question,
he continues, Stalin created “’a belt of instability’ from the Donbas to Crimea
and the Caucasus,” a belt that now threatens to tighten around Moscow because
it is rapidly extending “from the North Caucasus to the Far North through
Tatarstan, Bashkortostan and Siberia,” again because of Stalin’s actions.

The currently much-celebrated “effective
manager sowed ‘dragon’s teeth’ in the Caucasus,” and those teeth are generating
new monsters not only there but across the country.If Stalin’s legacy is continued rather than
overturned, Byurchiyev says, Russia and her neighbors are all headed for “’the
perfect storm’” that could destroy one or more of them.

Staunton, April 30 – Vladimir Putin
and his supporters have made the struggle against what they see as Russophobia
a cornerstone of their ideology, Yevgeny Ikhlov says; but if one examines the
characteristics they offer for this phenomenon, it is clear that Russophobia as
such does not exist.At the same time,
fear and hatred of Putin’s regime very much do.

The importance of this ideological
theme to the Kremlin has been underscored, the Moscow commentator says, by the
fact that immediately after Putin made his remarks about it, the World Russian
Popular Assembly insisted that Russophobia included any attacks on the Russian
Orthodox Church (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=5540F1C576899).

In defining the term, Ikhlov
continues, the Russian Popular Assembly advanced five assertions regarding
Russophobia (interfax-religion.ru/?act=documents&div=1259), all of which he says are at the very
least problematic. It asserts that the Russian people are being “subjected to
Russophobia, they are the victims of genocide in Ukraine, they are a victim
people, they are a divided people, and they have an identity which is being blurred.

Before considering each of these in
turn, the commentator notes that the claim that an attack on the Orthodox
Church is an attack on the Russian people is simply wrong. “Orthodoxy is not a
church of the Russian people … moreover, it is not an exclusive attribute of
‘the Russian world.’” Asserting otherwise undermines “the very idea of the
universality of Orthodoxy.”

The assertion that there is ethnic
hatred toward Russians as such in the contemporary world is without foundation,
Ikhlov says.The only place where one
could speak about this would be in the Baltic countries, “but this is a
manifestation of the most ordinary migrantophobia and diasporaphobia, which
Russians also display.

Around the world, people recognize Russian culture as “a
great world culture,” and Russians “have not encountered even that hostility
which for long years surrounded Germans after the first and especially after
the second world war.”Those who assert
otherwise do not know what they are talking about.

The fact that there exists “fear and hostility to the
Putin government” and that this is spreading and intensifying is quite another
matter, Ikhlov says. A century ago, “every literate individual could clearly
distinguish between the regime of Nicholas I and the Russian people and Russian
intelligentsia.”

Thirty years ago, people found no difficulties in
distinguishing bvetween the Russia of Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn and Russian
communism. “And now,” Ikhlov says, they have no problem recognizing that the
Russia of Boris Nemtsov is something entirely different than the Russia of
Vladimir Putin.

Confusing or conflating “fear before the imperial policy
of the Kremlin and the authoritarian mentality of the people with hostility
toward Russians as an ethnos” is simply foolish nonsense, Ikhlov suggests.

The second plank in the attack on supposed Russophobia is
that ethnic Russians are, it is said, being subjected to genocide in
Ukraine.”There is no truth to that, and
the word genocide should be used with care rather than tossed about whenever
one wants to blacken opponents and play the victim.

Russians can claim to be victims, Ikhlov says; but most often and
most seriously they have been victims of other Russians rather than of
foreigners of one kind or another. But they are not a victim people in the
sense that the Jews and Palestinians, Armenians and Tutsis are, and they should
not claim otherwise.

Nor is it correct to label the Russians “a
divided people,” as many of those now talking about Russophobia do. It is true
that the collapse of the USSR in 1991 left many ethnic Russians beyond the
borders of the Russian Federation, but “over the last quarter century much has
changed” and the Russians in these countries are now “classical examples of a
diaspora.”

Finally, Ikhlov argues, there is no evidence that Russian national
identity is being blurred. “On the contrary, Russians very clearly set
themselves apart from other ethnoses of the empire, having unwritten but in no
way less obligatory criteria of what is required from a non-Russian to be
recognized as a Russian,” even if various groups of Russians often fight about
that.

Staunton, April 30 – Between 1994 and
2003, ethnicity was the most important factor involved in decisions by
residents of the Russian Federation to emigrate, according to Mikhail Denisenko
of the Institute of Demography of the Higher School of Economics. But from 2004
to 2013, other factors, including economics and education, have been more
important.

In a
report delivered this month, Denisenko provides one of the most detailed
descriptions of emigration and its causes available as well as a serious
discussion of why it is often so difficult to determine the exact numbers and
motivations of those involved in this process (http://opec.ru/1820577.html).

At the present time, he says, there
are more than 2.7 million people who were born in the Russian Federation living
in countries beyond the boundaries of the former USSR. But specifying the exact
number is hard because many want to maintain their ties with Russia rather than
seek integration elsewhere and because no two countries count in the same way.

Nonetheless, Denisenko says, some
trends can be traced. During the first period, 1994-2003, more than 90 percent
of emigres from the Russian Federation went to Germany, the US, and
Israel.In the second period, 2004-2013,
many fewer people from Russia went to these countries and more went to a
broader variety of destinations.

Part of the reason for that, he
suggests, is that ethnicity became less of a driving factor as those who wanted
to join co-ethnics abroad had already done so. Another part is that the
attitudes of receiving countries changed and their willingness and ability to
register people. And still a third is that economic growth gave Russians more
choices, even when they chose to leave.

A major complicating factor for
anyone trying to track emigration is that some countries like the US define it
in terms of the country of birth while others like Germany define it in terms
of citizenship.Those can lead to very
different sets of numbers as can whether the receiving country allows dual
citizenship.

Germany does not, and Denisenko says
that is one of the reasons why the figures the German government has for the
number of Russians in Germany are vastly different than the number that the
Russian consular service says are there. The US and Israel do allow dual
citizenship, and there are now 118,000 Russian citizens in the former and
almost 137,000 in the latter.

Denisenko says that many stories in
the media seriously misstate how many Russian emigres there are in this or that
country. One place where the Russian media routinely suggest that there are
many Russians is Great Britain. In fact, there are only several tens of
thousands there, and Russia is not in the list of the top 70 countries from
which emigres there come.

An
increasingly large share of emigres from Russia are students who want to go to
university in Europe and the United States, Denisenko says, with the share of
such people among all those moving from Russia in the US rising from 14 percent
in 1995 to 31 percent in 2013. That pattern is contributing to a reduction in
the average age of emigres.

The
emigration in many cases is dominated by women. In Italy, for example, more
than 80 percent of Russian immigrants are women between the ages of 15 and 34.
Some have come as a result of marriage, but others are involved in one or
another profession, Denisenko says.At present, in most countries, Russian women outnumber
Russian men.

And those leaving are increasingly highly educated.
Almost three-quarters of Russian immigrants in Canada have higher educations.
In Great Britain, the figure is “almost 70 percent.”And elsewhere it is increasingly high as
well, as young Russians take advantage of educational and then career
opportunities abroad.

Staunton, April 30 – “When Vladimir
Putin or Sergey Lavrov talk about Ukraine,” Pavel Kazarin says, one has the
impression that they think there is a pro-Moscow faction in Kyiv waiting in the
wings to take power. That might have been true in 2005, but it is not the case
now: Moscow has no political allies in Kyiv and won’t have any ever again.

As a result of Moscow’s annexation
of Crimea and invasion of the Donbas, “there is no pro-Russian alternative,”
the Kyiv commentator says. “More than that,” he adds, “for the Kremlin, the
Ukrainian opposition will be in no way a lesser evil” than the government now
in place (https://slon.ru/posts/50845).

Ukrainians might elect “populists or
pragmatists or socialists or libertarians, but whoever occupies the chief
position of the country” will have the same view about the country that is
occupying part of Ukraine and, whatever Putin and Lavrov or anyone else thinks,
it is not and will not become positive or even acceptant.

After the flight of Viktor
Yanukovich, his Party of the Regions renamed itself the Opposition Bloc, but it
isn’t an opposition and its base is shrinking. What support it has comes from
Ukrainians who vote for people they know because they are from their city or
region rather than because of ideology.

And Moscow destroyed this group not only by its
aggression but by removing Crimeea and the Donbas, the two most “pro-Russian
and pro-Soviet” regions from Ukrainian politics. According to Kazarin, as a
result, “Ukraine is much more monolithic” and thus much more anti-Russian.

Radical
populists like Oleg Lyashko and Yuliya Timoshenko are a real opposition and
they use their lack of responsibility to win support by making promises than
they could not possibly deliver. But despite that and despite the fact that
their statements may help destabilize the situation, they too oppose Moscow on
all the most important issues.

For
them as for others on the Ukrainian political scene, the
worst label they can be given is “’agent of the Kremlin’” because they know
that “loyalty to Moscow could be the very last thing that would attract
voters.They too view Crimea as a
Rubicon, and they are not going to change either.

The Ukrainian
far right exists in the television broadcasts of Moscow’s Dmitry Kiselyov, but
it is “absent from the Verkhovna Rada.” Ukrainians aren’t attracted by ethnic
nationalism, Kazarin says, because “the Maidan creagted a demand for a
political nation in which blood and land are secondary factors and convictions
are what matters most.”

“Before Yanukovich, Ukraine was a corrupt oligarchic country.
After [his] victory, it became a criminal country.”It can’t go back to either as long as
Ukrainians are mobilized, and they will remain mobilized because they have no
doubts about the presence of Russian forces on the territory of their country.

This
leaves Moscow with only two possible ways forward: Either it can try to force
Kyiv to take back the Donbas on the Kremlin’s terms and thus institutionalize a
brake on its European aspirations, or it can push to destabilize the country
and then say that “there is no reason to conduct dialogue with ‘an East
European Somalia.’”

But neither of
these variants “will return that Ukraine which existed before 2014,” Kazarin
says. Russia’s shedding of blood and occupation of Ukrainian territory have
made that impossible for a long time to come -- whatever some in Moscow or
other capitals now prefer to think.

Wednesday, April 29, 2015

Staunton, April 29 – Despite
threatening language, Vladimir Putin is not going to start a nuclear war,
according to Yury Shvets, who studied along with him at the KGB’s Andropov
Institute. Putin’s only desire is to remain in power for life, he says, and he
knows Russia’s delivery systems aren’t accurate enough for a first strike that
would not result in national suicide.

But Putin’s actions threaten the future
of Russia, Shvets says, because his aggressive behavior has reinvigorated NATO,
undermined the possibility that the Russian economy can modernize and develop,
and likely guaranteed that the United States will choose a second Ronald Reagan
in 2016 to contain his country, reducing its importance and possibly its size.

Shvets, who studied with Putin and
then worked under TASS cover as a KGB officer in Washington in the 1980s,
offered these and many other observations about his former colleague, someone whose
KGB career, he says, showed him to be below average in competence and whose
presidential career reflects the skill of others in using television to boost
any leader.

According to Shvets, “now the chief strategic
conflict of Russia is the one between the striving of Putin to remain in place
until his death and the objective requirements of the country for normal
development.” If he succeeds in staying in office for long, “Russia will either
fall apart or be converted into a third-tier state like North Korea or
Mongolia.”

Like its Soviet predecessor, Shvets
continues, the Putin elite is terrified of the possibility that there will be a
popular revolt, one that would sweep them from power and lead to its members
being hanged from lamp posts “as it was in Budapest during the anti-Soviet uprising
in 1956.”

The former KGB officer says that the
probability of Putin pushing the nuclear button is “nil.”Even more than the Soviet Union, the Russian
Federation lacks the reliable counter-force delivery vehicles which could take
out an opponent’s nuclear capacity and prevent a response.It could hit cities, but in that case, the
response would be devastating for Russia.

But there is a more serious reason
for thinking Putin won’t start a nuclear war whatever he says. “Do you
seriously think,” he challenges his interview, “that a man who annually
disappears from public view for seven to ten days in order to have a facelift
and to fill himself up with Botox is capable of unleashing a nuclear war?”

That doesn’t mean that he will not
continue to threaten to do so, especially at present, Shvets says.“The current standoff of Washington and
Moscow reminds one of the US-USSR relationship of the end of the 1970s.America was then led by liberal and soft Jimmy
Carter,” something Moscow could have used to reach agreements.

But instead, Moscow invaded
Afghanistan and put new missiles in Europe. “As a result, after Carter, the
tough Ronald Reagan became president” and adopted a harder line against
Moscow.That provides the Soviet
siloviki with the chance to frighten their colleagues on the Politburo and
extract more money, power and glory from them.

And they were assisted in this by
the Soviet intelligence services. Anyone who reported anything less than the
notion that Reagan was about to attack the USSR was ignored and sidelined, and
consequently, all the intelligence that did make its way to the stop reinforced
the view of the hardliners.

“As a result,” Shvets says, “two
parallel realities arose in the USSR” – an invented one that served the
domestic interests of part of the elite and “real life in the country and
abroad.” At a certain point, a gap arose in such a way that the elite “occupied
itself with virtual threats but the economy of the state fell apart,” with the USSR
following in 1991.

Exactly the same
thing is taking place in Russia today, he argues. And just as in the Soviet
case, the siloviki near the top are destroying the country. They are pushing
for actions, such as an expanded invasion of Ukraine, that will lead to more
sanctions and more problems for the Russian economy.

Simple logic would dictate against
such a move, but “as the late Berezovsky said, ‘it is difficult to predict the
logic of idiots.’”

Now, thanks to what Putin and his
entourage have been doing, “the fate of Russia to a significant degree depends
on the US president.” If he ends restrictions on the export of gas and oil from
the United States, that alone would drive down world prices and cripple Russia’s
ability to function and survive.

Indeed, “if the West does not lift
sanctions, Russia will collapse in two years.” It won’t be able to produce
enough more oil and gas to compensate for falling prices, and it won’t be
forgiven for using the energy weapon.Even in Soviet times, the leadership never did that, recognizing that it
would be a two-edged sword.

But however that may be, Putin has
already by his action re-energized NATO and led to the expansion of its forces
near Russia’s borders, exactly the two outcomes that he has declared he is
working to prevent.And “Putin has
already done much to have the next US president become a new Reagan and
containment of Russia for a long time become Washington’s course.”

Staunton, April 29 – Aleksandr Bastrykin’s
proposal to amend the Russian constitution so that Russian national law would
take priority over international law is in fact another step toward the
elimination in Russia of basic human rights such as the presumption of
innocence in criminal trials, according to Pavel Svyatenkov.

Yesterday, Bastrykin, the chairman of
the Russian Investigative Committee, called for amending the 1993 Russian
Constitution in order to make national law supreme over international law in
order to boost what is today an ideologically popular theme, “the state
sovereignty of the Russian Federation” (rg.ru/2015/04/28/bastrykin.html).

Svyatenkov argues that this
proposal, which the Duma is to take up in June, is in fact not about that but a
Trojan horse intended to achieve another goal -- the end of the presumption of
innocence in Russian criminal trials – and that it thus represents “the
greatest attack on human rights in the history of the Russian Federation” (apn.ru/publications/article33478.htm).

Bastrykin, the Russian commentator
says, bases his argument on the notion that Russians must no longer live with the
risk that some foreigners will be able to tell them what to do without their
consent. But that is a red herring because “any international treaty is subject
to ratification by the Federal Assembly,” making such unilateral imposition of
foreign laws impossible.

In fact, Svyatenkov says, this
proposal from Bastrykin is closely linked to another piece of legislation the
latter is pushing, one that would in fact eliminate the presumption of
innocence in Russian criminal trials, a principle that means an accused must be
found not guilty if prosecutors do not prove their case.

But this piece of legislation says
that judges must “search for ‘some ‘objective truth’” and thus will be
entitled, if the prosecution does not prove its case, to send it back for
further investigation so that the government will have yet another chance to
find the defendant guilty – something clearly at variance with international
law.

Bastrykin has been pushing for this “’objective
truth’” standard for some time, Svyatenkov says, pointing to an interview the
investigator gave to “Rossiiskaya gazeta” three years ago (rg.ru/2012/03/15/bastrykin-site.html).
But he has run into a constitutional problem because of Article 15 and Article
17 of the Russian Constitution.

Article 15 reads in part, “the
generally recognized principles and norms of international law and international
agreements are a constituent part of tis legal system. If by an international
agreement of the Russian Federation are established different rules than those
set up by law, then the rulers of the international agreement are to be
applied.”

And Article 17 specifies, Svyatenkov
says, that “in the Russian Federation are recognized and guaranteed the rights
and freedoms of man and citizen in accordance with generally recognized
principles and norms of international law and in correspondence with the current
Constitution.”

“In other words,” he continues, in
Russia, “the generally accepted principles and norms of international law are
the guarantee of the observation of human rights,” a situation that reflects
the fact that the Russian constitution does not define these rights with
precision or establish the way they are to be protected.

Consequently, if Bastrykin’s
proposal is accepted, that will be equivalent under Russian conditions to a
rejection of “human rights as such.”

Svyatenkov points out that he is
no friend of the Yeltsin Constitution. “It is a bad Basic Law. It gives too
much power to the president. It created an asymmetrical federation. [And] there
is nothing in it about the Russian people.”But Bastrykin’s proposal if adopted “will make the Constitution of the Russian
Federation not better but worse.”

“If we want to be a sovereign state,
we must not reject generally accepted norms of international law but strengthen
them by adopting our own Bill of Rights, in which will be guaranteed the rights
and freedoms of the citizens of Russia,” including the presumption of innocence.
But until then, Russians must rely on the supremacy of international law.

The fate of Bastrykin’s proposal,
Svyatenkov says, “depends on the reaction of society.” So far, society hasn’t
spoken.But it should because of what is
at stake: Those who trample on human rights pay dearly “not only in gold but in
blood” and “even with Maidans” because the source of such risings is exactly
the kind of injustice that ignoring human rights can lead to.

Staunton, April 29 – Although few
want to recognize that this is the case, the personality cult surrounding
Vladimir Putin far exceeds the one that surrounded Stalin “by all measures” and
has become what can best be described as “the religion of a pagan empire,”
according to Moscow commentator Maksim Kantor.

In a post on Kasparov.ru, Kantor
points out that “Stalin stressed his status as a student of Lenin and
demonstratively pointed to the primacy of the leader in everything,” insisting
that he was “faithful to the principles of Lenin and the course of the founding
fathers – to the victory of Marx, Engels, Lenin and only then himself” (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=553FD1FF1829D).

Moreover, one cannot imagine Stalin
having golden jets or palaces or to think of him as someone “with a bared chest.”
It thus appears, the Moscow commentator continues, that for a full-blown cult
of personality one needs a certain “vulgarization of the idol” – and Stalin
wasn’t prepared to have that happen.

In essence, Kantor continues, “Stalin
really considered himself to be a communist; he really believed that he was
building an unheard of society of equality.” Consequently, he was viewed and
insisted on being viewed as “a builder of communism and not as a man or as the
most attractive individual of the tribe.”

It would not have entered the head of any
woman in the Soviet Union to think that she should bear Stalin’s child, he
says. “Women loved their men, but they believed Stalin. And this was not
completely a cult of personality. The phrase ‘Stalin is married to Russia’ was
in principle impossible.” Its use would have led to criminal charges.

Putin's cult has expanded
far beyond Stalins, “in part because of the tastelessness and vanity.”But “that is secondary,” Kantor says. The
main cause is that what we are observing is “the development of a pagan cult in
a nation which has lost all other convictions. There is no longer faith in
freedom or equality or democracy or communism.”

“What remains is a tribal faith – and the cult
of a leader (precisely a tribal and pagan cult) has replaced all ideology.”

Staunton, April 29 – Russian polls,
admittedly not the most reliable source, suggest that the more aggressive
Vladimir Putin is, the more Russians love and support him regardless of the
immediate impact of his policies on their lives, a vicious circle that history
suggests could lead to a disaster especially given Moscow’s possession of a
large army and nuclear weapons.

In a commentary in Kyiv’s “Den’,” Sergey
Grabovsky points out that Russian polls show that Putin’s rating among Russians
has dramatically increased since the annexation of Crimea and Moscow’s intervention
in the Donbas and that Russians feeling about their own situation have also
become more positive (day.kiev.ua/ru/blog/politika/strana-rabov-strana-gospod).

And he cites the words of Valery
Fedorov, the head of the VTsIOM polling agency, for an explanation: “The
economic crisis is not as deep as many feared it would be; expectations were
much worse. In addition, in the last year, the self-evaluation and self-respect
of Russians grew.”

That trend, the Kremlin-linked
pollster says, “is directly connected with Crimea, with the conflict in
Ukraine, with the fact that we now are not simply competing with the US but in
conflict with that country, and this, in the opinion of the majority of
Russians means that we are comparable in greatness.”

Such feelings, Fedorov suggests, are
“a very important element of the self-assessment” of Russians.” Given their
improved feelings about themselves on this basis, he adds, Russians have been “anesthetized”
against the impact of any economic problems they may face in their day-to-day
lives.

Grabovsky argues that this shows
that for “the absolute majority of Russians,” the three factors that explain
their positive feelings about themselves and about Putin are “foreign aggression,
conflicts with world leaders, and wars on Ukrainian territory. Everything else
for ‘the devoted people’ is not so important,” and their expectations for
themselves remain low.

All of this
might not matter much, he continues, “if Russia were not an enormous state with
nuclear weapons and a large land army.”

But it is, and
that means that “the despotic, neo-totalitarian power (one of the main
characteristics of totalitarianism is the impossibility of the rotation of
ruling groups) has at its command tens of millions of ‘slaves’ who do not
recognize the real danger for themselves and are ready to support the acts of ‘the
national leader’ and his people right up to ‘the red line.’

That is, Putin
has “tens of millions” of supporters “who are intoxicated not only from alcohol
but from global conflicts and local wars [and] who are prepared to suffer
serious problems in the name not of freedom, humanism, or national flourishing
but in order that someone else as a result of Russian actions will live badly.”

That in turn
has led within Russia to the flourishing of an autocratic state, xenophobia,
and a personality cult, Grabovsky says.And
as various cases from the history of the last century show, that can lead to
disaster. Russia’s possession of nuclear weapons compound that problem and mean
the disaster ahead could be far worse.

According to
the Ukrainian commentator, there is only one way out of this vicious circle: “Russia
with the help of the efforts of the international communist must be stripped of
its weapons of mass destruction. Once and for all so that the planet will be
protected against the rise to the head of this state of the latest ‘titan.’

Otherwise,
Putin or some future leader will be driven in that direction “not for the
defense of freedom or the increase of the well-being of the population” but
gain support for “aggressive attacks on its neighbors” and the use of “a threat
of nuclear attacks on all who do not agree” with him.

Staunton, April 29 – Vladimir Putin’s
“Kadyrov problem” just got a lot larger, so large in fact that it may ultimately
cost Moscow control of the North Caucasus: Yesterday, Ramazan Abdulatipov, the
Putin-appointed head of Daghestan, said that he supports Ramzan Kadyrov’s
position in his conflict with the Russian interior ministry.

First and most immediately, it means
that if Putin sacks Kadyrov in order to curry favor with the siloviki in
Moscow, he almost certainly will have to fire Abdulatipov and perhaps other
North Caucasus republic leaders as well, something that almost certainly would
in and of itself lead to the further destabilization of the region.

Second, and even more worrying from
Moscow’s perspective, it suggests that a united front may be emerging among
these republic leaders about how the Russian authorities are conducting
themselves in the North Caucasus. Abdulatipov normally is one of the most
cautious of the group. Consequently, if he is saying this, others likely feel
the same way.

And third, it shows that Moscow’s
ability to rely on its longstanding policy of divide and rule in the region may
be increasingly limited. If the center can’t isolate Kadyrov the way it
isolated Dzhokhar Dudayev, it loses one of the most important levers it has to
control Chechnya or any other part of the region.

Tuesday, April 28, 2015

Staunton, April 28 – The Victory Day
amnesty Vladimir Putin has promised “repeats all the mistakes of an analogous
measure of 15 years ago, when the godfathers of organized crime along with
repeat rapists and murders were released from prison” on an unsuspecting
population, according to “Versia” journalist Ruslan Gorevoy and the experts he
spoke with.

The
current amnesty like its predecessor in 2000 releases those who are suffering
from cancer or tuberculosis, who have medical decorations, or the status of
invalids. “Is this humane?” Gorevoy asks, suggesting that no one should “hurry
to agree” given that could allow those guilty of the most heinous crimes to go
free if they lack a leg, an arm, or can get medical certification.

This
Putin amnesty, like its predecessor, features bold declarations that such
things won’t happen, but it contains no legally enforceable language to prevent
that – and in fact, Gorevoy suggests, it opens new possibilities for various
kinds of corruption as those inside prisons work to get certified as having
conditions allowing for their release.

Given
that the heads of jails and camps will have the right to sign off on such certificates,
Vladimir Osechkin, a human rights activist, says, this virtually guarantees
that there will be “a trading in amnesties,” something that will involve
exactly the kind of corruption that the criminals and their jailors won’t be
able to resist.

One
large group that is certain to get out under this amnesty, Eva Merkacheva, a
member of Moscow’s public observer commission, will be siloviki who have been
convicted for exceeding their authority by beating or killing those under
arrest in order to extract confessions. She says that in her view, the current
amnesty is a sell-out to the siloviki “lobby.”

But
what will undoubtedly attract attention is that the current amnesty as drafted
does nothing to prevent the release of those guilty of cannibalism, pedophilia
and other sex crimes – even those who gained widespread attention because of
the seriousness of these offenses, Gorevoy says.

Moreover,
because the amnesty in 2000, Putin’s first, largely recapitulated all the
mistakes of the last Soviet-era amnesty in 1987, when “more than 60,000
prisoners, three quarters of whom were bandits, were turned loose on the
streets,” one result is certain beyond all others: many of those released will
soon be back behind bars for new crimes against society.

In
1990, for example, at least 16,000 of the 60,000 released three years earlier
were again in penal institutions, a pattern that was repeated in 2000 and is
likely to be repeated, following a new outburst of crime as a result of Putin’s
incautious actions in the coming years.

Two experts with whom Gorevoy spoke are disturbed by what
is happening. Valery Borshchyov, a rights activist with the Moscow Helsinki
Group, says that the draft amnesty plan this time around is “qualitatively”
different from the two most recent mass amnesties “and not for the better”
given that the new measure does not define key terms and thus invites abuse.

Pavel
Krasheninnikov, chairman of the Duma committee on civil, criminal, arbitrage and
procedural legislation, agrees, saying that the proposed amnesty could release
as few as 60,000 or lead to the release or dropping of criminal charges against
as many as 350,000 to 400,000, with all the negative consequences that could
involve.